By Karah-Leigh Hancock
VALDOSTA – Dr. Janice Odom is not your typical college professor.
Dr. Odom, who teaches various classes such as Writing for Business, Technical Writing and Grammar and Editing at Valdosta State University, has been interested in the supernatural and horror movies for as long as she can remember.
I was introduced to Dr. Odom through my inquiry about the Vampire Book Club after seeing an ad in the newspaper while designing one night. Little did I know that she worked and taught at the school I had just graduated from.
Dr. Odom is one of the many members of the Vampire Book Club that meets every Thursday at South Georgia Regional Library. The group of mostly women sit and discuss books that they are reading that deal with vampires and the supernatural.
“One of my job responsibilities (at VSU) is to do (community) service,” Dr. Odom said. “I thought about the possibility of talking to the library about leading a book discussion group and they put me in contact with Halley Little who coordinates all of this.”
After talking with Little, Dr. Odom suggested J.R. Ward’s book, “The Brotherhood of the Black Dagger,” and the Vampire Book Club took off.
Born and raised in a small town in east Tennessee, she attended the University of Tennessee for her bachelors degree. She went back to school in her 30s and earned her masters degree in rhetoric and composition with an emphasis in technical writing.
She then got her PhD at the University of Iowa in communication studies in the field of rhetorical studies.
She began teaching at Arizona State University in 1998 before coming to Valdosta to teach in 2006.
“I came from ASU, which is one of the largest campuses in the country,” she said. “I came from a department where people didn’t get along very well, and here, people make an effort to be nice to one another.”
“I teach in the professional writing program,” Dr. Odom said. “One of the things I like about it is the students are practice-oriented and are very interested in learning because it will affect their jobs. It makes the teaching interesting. So how did a woman from Tennessee who taught technical writing get into vampires? She just fell into it.
“I’m an avid reader and always have been,” Dr. Odom said. “One of the things that I was really interested in was science fiction. From that I had branched out into fantasy and somewhere along the line I got interested in vampires from things such as film and television.”
The first vampire book that she read, “The Brotherhood of the Black Dagger,” was the one that she suggested to Little that began the Vampire Book Club.
“I was hooked right away,” Dr. Odom said. “The universe was interesting. The characters were interesting. The plots were well developed so I just got hooked.”
Dr. Odom is not the only one that’s gotten hooked on the vampire genre.
With Stephanie Meyers’ ‘Twilight’ series selling over 70 million copies worldwide and Charlaine Harris’ ‘Southern Vampire Mysteries’ that spun off the HBO hit television show “True Blood,” vampires are everywhere.
“The vampire thing really interests me because it’s everywhere,” Dr. Odum said. “Since the late 1990’s, the interest in vampires has escalated phenomenally in U.S. culture. You see it in movies, television, magazines, books, music, you name the cultural medium and there are vampires there. The question is why in this point and time in our culture. Why vampires? That’s the question that got me interested in doing the book club. What is it about the pull, the attraction, why are we head over heels in love with vampires?”
Dr. Odom believes that there are multiple reasons the vampire genre has taken on a life of its own.
“I think part of it is a lot of these vampire series and novels have a religion, spiritual quest built in and somehow the connection to the other worldliness of the vampires strikes a cord,” she said. “I think right now as a culture we are very much on a spiritual quest. We have sort of lost our sense of direction in that aspect.”
Among some of her scholarly work, Dr. Odom has done research about gender, body and feminism.
“I think (another) one of the reasons the genre strikes a chord is that we’re at the end of a long struggle over gender,” Dr. Odom said. “’The Brotherhood of the Black Dagger’ is all about the family and community. There’s also the fact that in so much of the genre, the women are every bit as powerful as the men are.”
While she’s very involved in the fictional vampires, she also enjoys watching the genre on television.
“I was a huge fan of the “Moonlight” series last year, but it only lasted one season that annoyed me to no end,” she said.
She’s also a fan of the hit HBO show “True Blood.”
“I really love the Charlaine Harris series (that ‘True Blood’ is based on),” she said. “I think there’s something so sweet and something so tough about her (the main character, Sookie). She’s a good combination of soft and hard-headed.”
Though she is not a “Twilight” fan, she is somewhat concerned about children and teenagers involved in the genre.
“I don’t have any children, but I can imagine if I were a parent, I might be bothered by that,” she said. “Vampires are really an adult entertainment in some way. The whole sexuality issue, the way that some of these novels deal with it creates problems for some people.”
One of the ways she connects with her students is through her office decoration, which consists of posters from movies such as “Dracula” and television shows such as “Angel” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
“Universal response (from students) has been ‘oh this is so cool’,” she said. “I needed wallpaper but the other reason was for my students. It’s a way to connect with them. It lets them see in a quick glance of what my interests are. I’m interested in writing about these things as well as looking at them as objects.”
Among other posters in her office are “Them!,” “It Came from Beneath the Sea,” and “The Thing,” which are “B” horror movies from the 1950s.
“The reason I’m interested in these three movies, the women in these movies are really strong, powerful women and they’re from the 1950s,” she said. “When you look at the women in these movies, they were important role models for me.”
Dr. Odom has also written scholarly publications on science fiction and the paranormal, particularly the movies from the 1950s and has presented presentations about them at different at different scholarly conferences.
She has also began writing about vampires, not in fiction, but in academic form.
“When I was younger, I used to write a lot, then I became academic and I didn’t have time (for anything) but academic writing,” Dr. Odom said. “It’s been a long time since I tried my hand at fiction.”
“They think you go to class and teach and grade papers, but they have no idea how much time academic life takes. I am covered over with work all the time.”
When she is not teaching, writing about academia and visiting with her Vampire Book Club members, she is fascinated by art. “I’m a fairly serious amateur photographer,” she said. “I haven’t had much time for it lately. I love working with my camera, working with Adobe Photoshop.”
Dr. Odom’s mother, whom she was very close to, was an artist and painted right up until she died.
“I couldn’t draw and I couldn’t paint and she kept me interested in studying images and studying composition and color,” she said. “That’s what got me interested in all of that, so I was like ‘I can’t paint but I can shoot a camera!’”
After her mother’s death, Dr. Odom had the opportunity to travel abroad to Italy last summer to take art classes.”
“I’m enrolled as an art student,” she said. “I try to take an art class once in a while. I went on the Italy study abroad and studied Italian Renaissance Art.
Dr. Odom and her mother talked about art all the time and when the opportunity to go to Italy arose, she couldn’t pass it up.
“(The trip) was like a miracle because I felt so close to her while over there,” she said.
Since her mother’s death, Dr. Odom lives by herself with her two Chihuahuas, Phoebe (18 months old) and T-Rex (13 years old) and calls herself fairly independent. She was once married but has been divorced for more than 30 years.
“I just never got remarried,” she said. “I think maybe that one time cured me.”
During the ten years that her mother had been living with her, they had talked about changing their names legally to her mother’s maiden name.
“I changed my name last August,” she said. “I still had my married name and so did she. So after she died, well this is just it. I changed my name to her maiden name. I did not want to take my father’s name because my father and I had no relationship whatsoever. Why would I want his name? I liked my former husband better than my father.”
Though she had been Janice Norton, her married name, for 40 years, changing her name to Odom was a really hard change.
“It was a very strange thing to change my name at this point in my life but I didn’t want to go to the grave with his name,” she said.
